第7章

"He came again and again.Yet I was aware that Gennaro was no more happy than I was in his presence.My poor husband would sit pale and listless, listening to the endless raving upon politics and upon social questions which made up or visitor's conversation.Gennaro said nothing, but I, who knew him so well, could read in his face some emotion which I had never seen there before.At first I thought that it was dislike.Andthen, gradually, I understood that it was more than dislike.It was fear--a deep, secret, shrinking fear.That night--the night that I read his terror--I put my arms round him and I implored him by his love for me and by all that he held dear to hold nothing from me, and to tell me why this huge man overshadowed him so.

"He told me, and my own heart grew cold as ice as I listened.My poor Gennaro, in his wild and fiery days, when all the world seemed against him and his mind was driven half mad by the injustices of life, had joint a Neapolitan society, the Red Circle, which was allied to the old Carbonari.The oaths and secrets of this brotherhood were frightful, but once within its rule no escape was possible.When we had fled to America Gennaro thought that he had cast it all off forever.What was his horror one evening to meet in the streets the very man who had initiated him in Naples, the giant Gorgiano, a man who had earned the name of 'Death' in the south of Italy, for he was red to the elbow in murder! He had come to New York to avoid the Italian police, and he had already planted a branch of this dreadful society in his new home.All this Gennaro told me and showed me a summons which he had received that very day, a Red Circle drawn upon the head of it telling him that a lodge would be held upon a certain date, and that his presence at it was required and ordered.

"That was bad enough, but worse was to come.I had noticed for some time that when Gorgiano came to us, as he constantly did, in the evening, he spoke much to me; and even when his words were to my husband those terrible, glaring, wild-beast eyes of his were always turned upon me.One night his secret came out.I had awakened what he called 'love' within him--the love of a brute--a savage.Gennaro had not yet returned when he came.He pushed his way in, seized me in his mighty arms, hugged me in his bear's embrace, covered me with kisses, and implored me to come away with him.I was struggling and screaming when Gennaro entered and attacked him.He struck Gennaro senseless and fled from the house which he was never more to enter.It was a deadly enemy that we made that night.